Spotlight series #48 : Martin Corless-Smith

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

Author Statement

What do I think about poetry?

I do wonder, after all this time, why it is I am still writing.

That makes me question if I have any sense that poetry is an attempt to achieve something in particular, because surely I must have said what I felt I wanted to or needed to say by now?! I think, perhaps it is a way of being that I am drawn to, a spiritual/physical/emotional/intellectual nexus that draws me into the practice, a folding in of being and the instant of its reflection.

I have hoped and thought it necessary that what I do when writing is to attempt to make something (slightly) unprecedented, but if that it is the case, the consistency of my obsessions and the articulation of those obsessions must mean that really I am also more likely involved in a pleasurable re-iteration as well. Or a flash of the unprecedented is eventually exposed to being simply more of me being in the world.

I find that I am drawn to a phrase, a tonality, a rhythm, and it excites me, as if it is a question I have overheard, and then I find I start off following its lead. It’s entirely possible that it is a mishearing and a misunderstanding of something utterly ordinary, but that doesn’t matter. If one is drawn to examine a daisy, it need not be extraordinary to warrant examination and wonder. I am incorrigibly thrilled by existence, and I feel the need to say as much.

I think my writing is often sadder than I tend to be, which is possibly a prejudice on my part to privilege seriousness in art over whimsy. Hopefully this is not always successful. Formally I am drawn to the projection and momentary resolution of the quatrain. I think this happened as a way of holding my breath and intentions during longer pieces. I had no intention of letting the quatrain dominate my work quite as much as it has, and perhaps I am overly reliant on its comforting familiarity at this point. Perhaps this is why along with lyrics my books also resort to unruly prose (which even if unruly in syntax and meaning, often has an iambic engine).

I believe in poetry as a commons, a place of communal access and support where I have found the solace of great marvels and truths and doubts. I don’t think the fact of its communality means that poetry must be easily accessible (though some good poems might appear to be), or written within any particular attitude towards the common. We can make poetry as we see fit and read whatever poetry that catches our attention.

I don’t know how I am in the world these days, feeling often less certain of my own value and my ability to connect with my fellow man than I wish I did. It is perhaps the consolation of the invitation of poetry that allows me company when little else might.

To the Muses

Hey qwerty I hear you
hoped to be important
turned out ordinary
thas ok. Wasn even kind
or do my best
those days when I lean out
and feel the passing truck
society is full of kids
who didn’t ever get the balloon
see you on tv and hate myself

Oh qwerty can we count
ourselves into oblivion
she doesn’t love me as I hoped
I can’t seem to convince her
how the dogs are in a swoon
for god knows what reason
chewed the shoes and sausages
gave up myself a century ago
hilarious the vanity this jacket shows

When mother died
her open mouth had nothing fit to say
because there’s nothing but the rattle
of the curtain beads to show our passage
from the nylon sheets
into the ether over recent
duck ponds where the invalids
are wheeled out for fresh air

Oh qwerty hear the cars
on Highway number whatever
and hear the geese ridiculous
on top of multi-storey buildings
honking incongruously
just like me is why the passing stranger
smiles because we both know we are dead
and no one loves us and the goose
has nothing quite as wrong as we do
stacking unassailable anxieties
with fervor borrowed from lost
histories abandoned half way through.

Oh qwerty under ice
The whalers cannot find the whales
nor can the eskimos
I’m tired against your face
we care about the future
out of superstition
that a moral tale might find us out

qwerty with your azure plastic cover
like the earth
from outerspace
the semi blackness of our sphere

I cried into a cup
How’s that for performed sincerity
She wanted to break up with me
So thrilling I forgot to breathe.

Oh qwerty quiet on your bed
With pious disregard for my solicitations
how is a voice to wander
on this empty plane
unless you guide his wanton
hope. Scroll as we might
the future cannot raise an ear
until you call to her
faithless and immune
I like an accident
that gathers all these lines
am of no consequence
except for happening to register
a mere impression on the matter

qwerty in paris cairo rome
alone with the impossible
and infinite I’m bound
why I recall the names of schoolyard bullies
rather than the title of a favourite book
hold out your hand to strangers
just to feel rejection as a common bond
hail to the passing citi-cab
thrill in my anonymity
the Russians dream of mother Rus
the Danish with their haughty frowns
the Germans like a plate of wurst
the English fumble under eiderdowns.

qwerty curves in space and time
collapsing in synaptic voids
all alligators facing east
all litter coloured orange, red & green

what a mean is that we’re alone
alive and thas impossible,
the subject organized
to make the most of this
which for some years has seemed
as if it were a trial I failed?
Are we afraid to no longer bee
To not hold out an arm to touch
The passing tree burns
as there’s no
tomorrow
just a day (this one)
along the way to none

I sin a wasp
Size off my fingre
Sitting top a yellow fleur
It says to me tomorrow morning
I’m gone be dead
And you still here

One thousand Götternamen
crawling on the weedy stamen
totamque infusa per artus
mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet

There may be fire dancing on the screen
Dear qwerty fifty crews outmuscled by a spark
There is a drone that hovers over every noun
and when we smile we see ourselves on television
When I loved last century I had a bicycle to get me there
and now I’m sitting in the airport lounge,
trying not to see the daytime tv host ejaculate his praise
repeated every thirty minutes on a loop
until some other element is added to refresh the tape.

Hey qwerty it’s impossible to say
to speak at all. I called the other day and heard myself
half a second afterwards, and knew it wasn’t me.

Saw a sparrow didn’t need
me drinking tea & eating lemon slice
Getting high and disappearing
Like old times and mother dear

Saying I never knew what
It felt like to be alive
The birds hop in the sapling &
I walk by and die im abendrot

*

If you were raised as a girl
qwerty where is your body now?
if love was dropped from the basinet
onto the shining boards of the salle à manger

even an atom can find no home
its name around it like a satellite
who should a self pretend to find
craning in her cot, her toes entwined

*

cousin qwerty plays the Sybil cards
address the morning as you would a friend
a relative as such it is (of course)
she can’t help but suffer true to type
and miserable we say and do in fragments
miserly withdrawn from common intercourse

If I had a table qwerty I would bend
you over it you nonexistent muse
and gingerly accuse you of my own desire
which muscled you out of the air

if I has a voice it is an echo
of your reckoning
and swallows spit to punctuate
the exhalations of my sobbing aria

*

reported missing Thursday night
we continue to follow
all leads and enquiries if the public
spectacle of loss and rhetoric that ends all hope

we ask the muse to help us answer
questions we have never asked
please don’t hesitate in coming forward
a dedicated line has been set up

Martin Corless-Smith was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He trained as a painter before doing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD at the University of Utah. His most recent collection of poetry is The Fool & The Bee (Shearsman Books, UK 2019) and he has a collection of essays, The Poet’s Tomb, forthcoming from Parlor Press in 2020. He lives and teaches in Boise, Idaho.